- Professor Charles Green,
Art History, School of Culture and Communication
University of Melbourne
Victoria 3010 Australia - +61 3 8344 4429
- Art History, Contemporary Art, Painting, New Media Art & Emerging Practices, Art Practice as Research, Curatorial Practice (Art), and 17 moreModern & Contemporary ARt, World Art History, War art, Biennales, Art Theory, History of Exhibitions, Postsocialism, South-south cooperation, Installation Art, Practice-Based Research, Curating contemporary art, Global South, Twentieth Century Art, Curation, Art Theory and Politics, Australian art, and Cold War and Cultureedit
- I am Professor of Contemporary Art in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Autho... moreI am Professor of Contemporary Art in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.
Author of Peripheral Vision (Craftsman House, 1996) and The Third Hand (U Minnesota Press, 2001), I completed a history of biennials in contemporary art, Biennials, Triennials and Documenta (Blackwell Wiley, 2016), with Associate Professor Anthony Gardner (Oxford University), assisted by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant.
Lyndell Brown and Charles Green have worked in collaboration as one artist since 1989. We are based in regional Victoria. Our works are included in most of Australia’s public art collections and many private and corporate collections. In 2007, we were Australia’s Official War Artists, deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and between 2011 and 2019 worked on follow-up collaborations with artist Jon Cattapan (assisted by two Australian Research Council Discovery Grant) about the aftermath of Australia’s wars since Vietnam, which the three artists exhibited in Melbourne across two galleries in late 2014, accompanied by a book (Framing Conflict: Contemporary War and Aftermath, Macmillan, 2014). Dr Lyndell Brown is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre for Visual Art at the University of Melbourne.edit
Understanding Displacement Aesthetics reframes the way refugees and the conditions of displacement are seen. Through a blend of historical research, and long-term collaborative curatorship, it aims to challenge the limitations that... more
Understanding Displacement Aesthetics reframes the way refugees and the conditions of displacement are seen. Through a blend of historical research, and long-term collaborative curatorship, it aims to challenge the limitations that contexts of displacement present for artists, art galleries and institutions addressing refugeedom and its legacies.
The exhibition contains a work by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
The exhibition contains a work by Lyndell Brown and Charles Green
Research Interests:
The subject of this article is the absence of Aboriginal art during the period that established the idea of a distinctively Australian modern art. It is intended as a contribution to the historiography of modern and contemporary... more
The subject of this article is the absence of Aboriginal art during the period that established the idea of a distinctively Australian modern art. It is intended as a contribution to the historiography of modern and contemporary Australian art history. The period discussed is the two decades between 1962, when Bernard Smith published Australian Painting,
1788–1960, and 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary. The article explores what changed in these years when art historians, critics, and curators, albeit belatedly and reluctantly, finally began to acknowledge the great contemporary Aboriginal painting that had long been in many artists’ sights as inspiration and model, and in plain view on display in the so-called primitive cultures’ sections of state museums. It argues that this was because it did not seem part of the national story of art.
1788–1960, and 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary. The article explores what changed in these years when art historians, critics, and curators, albeit belatedly and reluctantly, finally began to acknowledge the great contemporary Aboriginal painting that had long been in many artists’ sights as inspiration and model, and in plain view on display in the so-called primitive cultures’ sections of state museums. It argues that this was because it did not seem part of the national story of art.
Research Interests:
Artists, writers and gardeners have continually delved beneath the stormy waters of their lives, seeking images to convey turbulence, find refuge, or even explain and forgive their own privileges through appeals to the laws of disruptive... more
Artists, writers and gardeners have continually delved beneath the stormy waters of their lives, seeking images to convey turbulence, find refuge, or even explain and forgive their own privileges through appeals to the laws of disruptive nature. In this book, we explore disruption and conflict in images of gardens and plants, which are usually taken to represent peace and harmony. The connection that artists make between art, gardens and conflict has changed over time because the understanding of conflict is always entangled with political, cultural and scientific change. Indigenous peoples have experienced this right up to the present, to their great cost. And of course, today, contemporary artists often frame their ideas about gardens within the overwhelming, urgent perspective of climate change. In this book, we aim to place gardens and plants and art within a long, panoramic view-across centuries of upheaval and war that have led towards the present.
Enwezor’s biennial was, the authors of Biennials, Triennials and documenta. The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (2016) argue, the site of an intense and telling disagreement about the role of a biennial of contemporary art in a... more
Enwezor’s biennial was, the authors of Biennials, Triennials and documenta. The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (2016) argue, the site of an intense and telling disagreement about the role of a biennial of contemporary art in a time of crisis. It was caught in the frictions between Enwezor’s internationalist ambition to scrutinize globalization from a postnational perspective, hailed by international reviewers, and South African demands for identity politics and nation building at a time of enforced financial austerity, all resulting in a sometimes hostile local reception and its marginal importance to civic leaders. Although located in a radically different time and space, the critical reception of the second Johannesburg Biennale seems to foreshadow the response that documenta 14 (2017) received twenty years later in Athens, where curator Adam Szymczyk was blamed for crisis tourism, for turning Athens into an exemplary showcase of the destructiveness of neoliberal austerity measures while allegedly not taking into account the needs of the local scene enough. And it is perhaps no coincidence that the authors draw attention to the necessity to understand the power and nuances of such patterns of critique in the wake of Brexit, in an era when nationalist policies have gained new momentum across the globe and the dream of a postnational world seems to move out of reach. In times like these, we should turn to Okwui Enwezor’s legacy, reminding ourselves one year after the curator’s tragically early death, that his exhibitions were always generous interventions within specific and charged histories, opening up new realities yet to come.
This paper looks at Australian art criticism at the start of the 1970s and at the emergence of a short-lived art journal 'Other Voices' featuring a young art critic and art historian, Terry Smith. The essay argues that writing on... more
This paper looks at Australian art criticism at the start of the 1970s and at the emergence of a short-lived art journal 'Other Voices' featuring a young art critic and art historian, Terry Smith. The essay argues that writing on art by scholars from the emergent discipline of Australian art history was significant in contemporary art's innovations. But, it is argued, Australian art history also distorted the course of Australian art. The art historians' false consciousness of nation remained central within Australian art history. Emergent generations of young art writers and art historians could not participate in the establishment of a sustainable and sustained discourse on contemporary art without participating, within the context of Cold War politics, in a reification of the categories of 'Australian' in opposition to the idea of 'International' art, no matter how hard they tried. Young art critic Terry Smith's pessimistic evaluation, even bef...
Research Interests:
In 1989, at the old Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in the Domain Gardens, we saw the collaborative duo Russian artists Komar and Melamid talk about their work. We were both fascinated. We loved the sheer skill of the socialist... more
In 1989, at the old Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in the Domain Gardens, we saw the collaborative duo Russian artists Komar and Melamid talk about their work. We were both fascinated. We loved the sheer skill of the socialist realism of their work, its cleverness, and the weird mysteriousness of not knowing who did what, there being really one artist out of two. Back in the studio, as we talked about it, we gradually realized how relevant this was to us, for we'd been talking about how much we wished elements in photographs, such as the still life bric a brac, the pages of text, the shiny surfaces, could move into paintings, to get the deep somber spaces of Green's paintings and his background in conceptual art into Brown's photographs of carefully arranged objects and texts. A recent series of re-created pre-collaboration works (figures 1 and 2) was a way of recapitulat-ing, understanding and absorbing that pre-collaboration history into our work via a retrospe...
Research Interests:
Introduction The subject of this essay is one of the most important travelling exhibitions ever to arrive in Australia, Two Decades of American Painting (henceforth, Two Decades), a large exhibition of postwar New York School paintings,... more
Introduction The subject of this essay is one of the most important travelling exhibitions ever to arrive in Australia, Two Decades of American Painting (henceforth, Two Decades), a large exhibition of postwar New York School paintings, many of which were indisputable masterpieces, coordinated and curated by the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.1 During 1967 the exhibition toured to two Australian cities, first to Melbourne at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and then to Sydney at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), at the end of an itinerary that had comprised Kyoto in Japan and New Delhi in India.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In 2007, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, who have worked as one artist in collaboration since 1989, were commissioned by the Australian War Memorial to serve as Australian Official War Artists in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were given... more
In 2007, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, who have worked as one artist in collaboration since 1989, were commissioned by the Australian War Memorial to serve as Australian Official War Artists in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were given complete artistic freedom and unique access to the unfolding War on Terror’s two principal conflict zones, but their deployment occurred at a point where both zones definitively escaped the West’s ability to impose its imperial power, and thus they were often hemmed in by the realities of two deteriorating wars and the fantasies of their hosts. This chapter, illustrated by their works both during and after their official commission, unpacks the process by which the artists tried to make artistic sense of their experience.
Research Interests:
Abstract This essay explains how and why three contemporary artists took on a commission from the Australian War Memorial. In doing so, it will examine how art that deals with conflict during the contemporary period has expanded and... more
Abstract This essay explains how and why three contemporary artists took on a commission from the Australian War Memorial. In doing so, it will examine how art that deals with conflict during the contemporary period has expanded and altered. It surveys the increasing preoccupation with conflict art and war photography in the West during the twenty-first century due to Western enmeshment in ongoing conflicts since Vietnam and up to Iraq, Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, Libya, and Syria. It argues that different types of war image have emerged that blur the edges of art, document, and technology; in engaging with contemporaneity and contemporary art, war images have turned away from the traditional rhetoric of war art – both pro- and anti-war – and therefore challenge the public's investment in evolving national stories that, it has been far too easily assumed, would be made manifest in official war art and photography.
Research Interests:
ABSTRACT
Research Interests:
Contemporary art is rife with attempts to join itself to sport and entertainment, from Matthew Barney's Cremaster 4 (1994) and 1 (1995) to Gabriel Orozco's abstractions of newspaper sports images in Atomists (1996) to Douglas... more
Contemporary art is rife with attempts to join itself to sport and entertainment, from Matthew Barney's Cremaster 4 (1994) and 1 (1995) to Gabriel Orozco's abstractions of newspaper sports images in Atomists (1996) to Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's filmic portrait of French soccer star Zin dine Zidane, Zidane, un Portrait du 21e Si cle (Zidane: A Twenty-first Century Portrait, 2006). Similarly, Australian artist Shaun Gladwell's videos are saturated with images of the artist and his peers at play. The games they play are serious and usually risky. With sumptuous, slow-motion cinematography - but minimal post-production digital manipulation - Gladwell's videos portray seemingly casual feats of physical coordination, grace, and endurance by him and other skateboarders, as well as breakdancers, capoeira practitioners, and BMX bicyclists. Yet, the easy grace of these movements belies their intrinsic, complex motivations. Moving beyond notions of critique and critical practice, so vital to 1990s art and theory, Gladwell's games embrace immersive infotainment. While such strategies have been examined for their political potential, we argue that Gladwell's videos - which offer gesture as their sole content - are more ambivalent in their political charge. They tap into an older understanding of the affective ground that underpins the merging of art and mass culture.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
ABSTRACT
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Artists, writers and gardeners have continually delved beneath the stormy waters of their lives, seeking images to convey turbulence, find refuge, or even explain and forgive their own privileges through appeals to the laws of disruptive... more
Artists, writers and gardeners have continually delved beneath the stormy waters of their lives, seeking images to convey turbulence, find refuge, or even explain and forgive their own privileges through appeals to the laws of disruptive nature. In this book, we explore disruption and conflict in images of gardens and plants, which are usually taken to represent peace and harmony. The connection that artists make between art, gardens and conflict has changed over time because the understanding of conflict is always entangled with political, cultural and scientific change. Indigenous peoples have experienced this right up to the present, to their great cost. And of course, today, contemporary artists often frame their ideas about gardens within the overwhelming, urgent perspective of climate change. In this book, we aim to place gardens and plants and art within a long, panoramic view-across centuries of upheaval and war that have led towards the present.
This essay discusses the recent artistic depictions of contemporary war by four artist-academics based in Australia. The families of all four have served in some of the twentieth century's major conflicts and, more recently, each has been... more
This essay discusses the recent artistic depictions of contemporary war by four artist-academics based in Australia. The families of all four have served in some of the twentieth century's major conflicts and, more recently, each has been commissioned in Australia or the UK to serve as war artists. Collaboratively and individually they produce artwork (placed in national collections) and then, as academics, have come to reflect deeply on the heritage of conflict and war by interrogating contemporary art's representations of war, conflict and terror. This essay reflects on their collaborations and suggests how Australia's war-aware, even warlike heritage, might now be re-interpreted not simply as a struggle to safeguard our shores, but as part of a complex, deeply connected global discourse where painters must re-cast themselves as citizens of the 'global South'.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
In 1967 the exhibition Two Decades of American Painting, organised by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, travelled to Sydney and Melbourne. While the exhibition has often been framed as introducing Australian artists to new forms of... more
In 1967 the exhibition Two Decades of American Painting, organised by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, travelled to Sydney and Melbourne. While the exhibition has often been framed as introducing Australian artists to new forms of abstract painting, this paper argues that the paintings exhibited were just one manifestation of the transnational proliferation of abstraction globally, and that the exhibition precipitated a series of resonances, contacts and missed contacts between New York and Australia.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
... Abramovic and Ulay's unqualified appropriation of the Aboriginal and Tibetan other goes with ... and connections with Aboriginal painters were the foundational experiences henceforth shaping their art. ... and Ulay run up against... more
... Abramovic and Ulay's unqualified appropriation of the Aboriginal and Tibetan other goes with ... and connections with Aboriginal painters were the foundational experiences henceforth shaping their art. ... and Ulay run up against a sceptical bias in contemporary Western cultural ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
As late as the early 1990s, it seemed to many Australian art critics that a multicultural, appropriation-based POST-MODERNISM would constitute a distinctively Australian contribution to art (see IMANTS TILLERS). However, by the... more
As late as the early 1990s, it seemed to many Australian art critics that a multicultural, appropriation-based POST-MODERNISM would constitute a distinctively Australian contribution to art
(see IMANTS TILLERS). However, by the mid-1990s, for reasons at the same time political, economic and simply artistic, it was no longer possible to reduce the art made at the so-called periphery (in Australia) and art created at the so-called centre (at the traditional North Atlantic hubs of art production and consumption) to relationships between Post-modern (even post-colonial) copies and North Atlantic originals. Post-modernism as a coherent framework for explaining either Australian or international art was finished.
(see IMANTS TILLERS). However, by the mid-1990s, for reasons at the same time political, economic and simply artistic, it was no longer possible to reduce the art made at the so-called periphery (in Australia) and art created at the so-called centre (at the traditional North Atlantic hubs of art production and consumption) to relationships between Post-modern (even post-colonial) copies and North Atlantic originals. Post-modernism as a coherent framework for explaining either Australian or international art was finished.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Throughout the twentieth century, artists and theorists have converted the methodologies of art museum curatorship into artistic tropes to be activated and yet concealed. This chapter is composed of two related texts that confront the... more
Throughout the twentieth century, artists and theorists have converted the methodologies of art museum curatorship into artistic tropes to be activated and yet concealed. This chapter is composed of two related texts that confront the notion of theory at the museum with reference to artists’ ideas of their works as model “museums in hiding.” However, the present chapter is not concerned with a survey of the many well‐known instances of artists who have mined museum archives (for instance, Mark Dion, Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, Martha Rosler) but with a particular instance of museological representation: the atlas. In the first part of the chapter, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green identify what they call the “memory effect” of the artistic atlas through which
many artists and theorists – from the early twentieth century until now – have constructed and thus rethought the effect of memory, describing this effect from the point of view of working artists. In the second part, Amelia Barikin presents a case study of Brown and Green’s work – and a specific type of museum – with particular attention to the mnemonic function of the Australian
War Memorial. The curatorial synthesis of a modern memory effect is seen both as foundational to the formation of such museums and as a significant driver for the contemporary enactment of memory, in this case within Brown and Green’s art.
many artists and theorists – from the early twentieth century until now – have constructed and thus rethought the effect of memory, describing this effect from the point of view of working artists. In the second part, Amelia Barikin presents a case study of Brown and Green’s work – and a specific type of museum – with particular attention to the mnemonic function of the Australian
War Memorial. The curatorial synthesis of a modern memory effect is seen both as foundational to the formation of such museums and as a significant driver for the contemporary enactment of memory, in this case within Brown and Green’s art.
Research Interests:
WHAT IS POSTNATIONAL ART HISTORY? This essay will approach the idea of postnational art history in relation to contemporary art through a particular lens, that of war and conflict, for postnational art history would certainly show... more
WHAT IS POSTNATIONAL ART HISTORY? This essay will approach the idea of postnational art history in relation to contemporary art through a particular lens, that of war and conflict, for postnational art history would certainly show unrelenting war and conflict across and within nation-states over the past 60 years.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-1994 is an introduction to the ideas current in Australian art from the 1970s onwards, providing a summary of issues that are still in flux. The broad narrative of recent visual practice... more
Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-1994 is an introduction to the ideas current in Australian art from the 1970s onwards, providing a summary of issues that are still in flux. The broad narrative of recent visual practice is mapped, illuminated by discussions of individual artists and of the events, galleries, writers and international debates that have played a significant part in the development of recent Australian art.
The progressive Australian art of the 1970s - often deliberately ephemeral and confrontational in nature, and as a result often neglected in art museums and histories -is reappraised. The 1970s work of artists such as Mike Parr, Bonita Ely, Aleks Danko, Domenico de Clario, Vivienne Binns and Robert Rooney provides the background against which subsequent developments are discussed. In the ensuing decades a diversity of styles, media and ideas have flourished, coexisting to create the stimulating and complex Australian art scene of today.
As they did in the 1970s, theoretical writings continue to play a large part in raising and elaborating the issues taken up by artists. The relevance of postmodern and postcolonial ideas within an Australian context is discussed, with reference to local artists including Imants Tillers, Juan Davila, Susan Norrie, Narelle Jubelin, Tim Johnson and Pansy Napangati. Peripheral Vision steers the reader through the fascinating field of recent Australian art, with detailed description and analysis of works, including paintings, photography, performances and installations.
The progressive Australian art of the 1970s - often deliberately ephemeral and confrontational in nature, and as a result often neglected in art museums and histories -is reappraised. The 1970s work of artists such as Mike Parr, Bonita Ely, Aleks Danko, Domenico de Clario, Vivienne Binns and Robert Rooney provides the background against which subsequent developments are discussed. In the ensuing decades a diversity of styles, media and ideas have flourished, coexisting to create the stimulating and complex Australian art scene of today.
As they did in the 1970s, theoretical writings continue to play a large part in raising and elaborating the issues taken up by artists. The relevance of postmodern and postcolonial ideas within an Australian context is discussed, with reference to local artists including Imants Tillers, Juan Davila, Susan Norrie, Narelle Jubelin, Tim Johnson and Pansy Napangati. Peripheral Vision steers the reader through the fascinating field of recent Australian art, with detailed description and analysis of works, including paintings, photography, performances and installations.
Research Interests:
Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-1994 is an introduction to the ideas current in Australian art from the 1970s onwards, providing a summary of issues that are still in flux. The broad narrative of recent visual practice... more
Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-1994 is an introduction to the ideas current in Australian art from the 1970s onwards, providing a summary of issues that are still in flux. The broad narrative of recent visual practice is mapped, illuminated by discussions of individual artists and of the events, galleries, writers and international debates that have played a significant part in the development of recent Australian art.
The progressive Australian art of the 1970s - often deliberately ephemeral and confrontational in nature, and as a result often neglected in art museums and histories -is reappraised. The 1970s work of artists such as Mike Parr, Bonita Ely, Aleks Danko, Domenico de Clario, Vivienne Binns and Robert Rooney provides the background against which subsequent developments are discussed. In the ensuing decades a diversity of styles, media and ideas have flourished, coexisting to create the stimulating and complex Australian art scene of today.
As they did in the 1970s, theoretical writings continue to play a large part in raising and elaborating the issues taken up by artists. The relevance of postmodern and postcolonial ideas within an Australian context is discussed, with reference to local artists including Imants Tillers, Juan Davila, Susan Norrie, Narelle Jubelin, Tim Johnson and Pansy Napangati. Peripheral Vision steers the reader through the fascinating field of recent Australian art, with detailed description and analysis of works, including paintings, photography, performances and installations.
The progressive Australian art of the 1970s - often deliberately ephemeral and confrontational in nature, and as a result often neglected in art museums and histories -is reappraised. The 1970s work of artists such as Mike Parr, Bonita Ely, Aleks Danko, Domenico de Clario, Vivienne Binns and Robert Rooney provides the background against which subsequent developments are discussed. In the ensuing decades a diversity of styles, media and ideas have flourished, coexisting to create the stimulating and complex Australian art scene of today.
As they did in the 1970s, theoretical writings continue to play a large part in raising and elaborating the issues taken up by artists. The relevance of postmodern and postcolonial ideas within an Australian context is discussed, with reference to local artists including Imants Tillers, Juan Davila, Susan Norrie, Narelle Jubelin, Tim Johnson and Pansy Napangati. Peripheral Vision steers the reader through the fascinating field of recent Australian art, with detailed description and analysis of works, including paintings, photography, performances and installations.
Research Interests:
Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-1994 is an introduction to the ideas current in Australian art from the 1970s onwards, providing a summary of issues that are still in flux. The broad narrative of recent visual practice... more
Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-1994 is an introduction to the ideas current in Australian art from the 1970s onwards, providing a summary of issues that are still in flux. The broad narrative of recent visual practice is mapped, illuminated by discussions of individual artists and of the events, galleries, writers and international debates that have played a significant part in the development of recent Australian art. The progressive Australian art of the 1970s - often deliberately ephemeral and confrontational in nature, and as a result often neglected in art museums and histories -is reappraised. The 1970s work of artists such as Mike Parr, Bonita Ely, Aleks Danko, Domenico de Clario, Vivienne Binns and Robert Rooney provides the background against which subsequent developments are discussed. In the ensuing decades a diversity of styles, media and ideas have flourished, coexisting to create the stimulating and complex Australian art scene of today.
As they did in the 1970s, theoretical writings continue to play a large part in raising and elaborating the issues taken up by artists. The relevance of postmodern and postcolonial ideas within an Australian context is discussed, with reference to local artists including Imants Tillers, Juan Davila, Susan Norrie, Narelle Jubelin, Tim Johnson and Pansy Napangati. Peripheral Vision steers the reader through the fascinating field of recent Australian art, with detailed description and analysis of works, including paintings, photography, performances and installations.
As they did in the 1970s, theoretical writings continue to play a large part in raising and elaborating the issues taken up by artists. The relevance of postmodern and postcolonial ideas within an Australian context is discussed, with reference to local artists including Imants Tillers, Juan Davila, Susan Norrie, Narelle Jubelin, Tim Johnson and Pansy Napangati. Peripheral Vision steers the reader through the fascinating field of recent Australian art, with detailed description and analysis of works, including paintings, photography, performances and installations.
Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-1994 is an introduction to the ideas current in Australian art from the 1970s onwards, providing a summary of issues that are still in flux. The broad narrative of recent visual practice... more
Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-1994 is an introduction to the ideas current in Australian art from the 1970s onwards, providing a summary of issues that are still in flux. The broad narrative of recent visual practice is mapped, illuminated by discussions of individual artists and of the events, galleries, writers and international debates that have played a significant part in the development of recent Australian art. The progressive Australian art of the 1970s - often deliberately ephemeral and confrontational in nature, and as a result often neglected in art museums and histories -is reappraised. The 1970s work of artists such as Mike Parr, Bonita Ely, Aleks Danko, Domenico de Clario, Vivienne Binns and Robert Rooney provides the background against which subsequent developments are discussed. In the ensuing decades a diversity of styles, media and ideas have flourished, coexisting to create the stimulating and complex Australian art scene of today.
As they did in the 1970s, theoretical writings continue to play a large part in raising and elaborating the issues taken up by artists. The relevance of postmodern and postcolonial ideas within an Australian context is discussed, with reference to local artists including Imants Tillers, Juan Davila, Susan Norrie, Narelle Jubelin, Tim Johnson and Pansy Napangati. Peripheral Vision steers the reader through the fascinating field of recent Australian art, with detailed description and analysis of works, including paintings, photography, performances and installations.
As they did in the 1970s, theoretical writings continue to play a large part in raising and elaborating the issues taken up by artists. The relevance of postmodern and postcolonial ideas within an Australian context is discussed, with reference to local artists including Imants Tillers, Juan Davila, Susan Norrie, Narelle Jubelin, Tim Johnson and Pansy Napangati. Peripheral Vision steers the reader through the fascinating field of recent Australian art, with detailed description and analysis of works, including paintings, photography, performances and installations.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This chapter looks at the new theories of contemporary art that appeared from the end of the 1960s into the early 1970s, as writers turned away from artistic (and, by now, defensive) nationalism towards a new art that uneasily managed to... more
This chapter looks at the new theories of contemporary art that appeared from the end of the 1960s into the early 1970s, as writers turned away from artistic (and, by now, defensive) nationalism towards a new art that uneasily managed to be both internationalist and autobiographical. That this turn occurred in the process of young artists’ disillusionment precisely with the art movement—conceptual art—which was the most truly globalised and the least tainted by nationalism or provincialism. This was remarkable. So, at the turn into the 1970s within the small art worlds of Melbourne and Sydney, Donald Brook, an immensely literate and indisputably brilliant—if pugnacious and irascible—art theorist, not only explained that national identity was irrelevant in art but also mounted devastating arguments in support of his theories. Brook was resolutely concerned with art but not at all concerned with ‘Australian art.’